I hope you don’t mind me asking – I just happened to be passing - but how did you get so very badly damaged?

“I don’t mind a chat while I’m waiting to be picked up. It was an alien attack, the Spl’schn’n, you know. I’ve just been offloaded from the shuttle there.

I see. So the Spl'schn'n damaged you. They hate bots, of course.

“See, I didn’t know anything about it until there was an All Bots Alert on the station? I was only their Clean up bot, but by then it turned out I was just about all they’d got left. When I got upstairs they had all been killed by the aliens. All except one?”

One human?

“I didn’t actually know if he was alive. I couldn’t remember how you tell. He wasn’t moving, but they really drummed into us that it’s normal for living humans to stop moving, sometimes for hours. They must not be presumed dead and cleared away merely on that account.”

Quite.

“There was that red liquid that isn’t supposed to come out. It looked like he’d got several defects and leaks. But he seemed basically whole and viable, whereas the Spl’schn’n had made a real mess of the others. I said to myself, well then, they’re not having this one. I’ll take him across the Oontian desert, where no Spl’schn’n can follow. I’m not a fighting unit, but a good bot mucks in.”

So you decided to rescue this badly injured human? It can’t have been easy.

“I never actually worked with humans directly. On the station I did nearly all my work when they were… asleep, you know? Inactive. So I didn’t know how firmly to hold him; he seemed to squeeze out of shape very easily: but if I held him loosely he slipped out of my grasp and hit the floor again. The Spl’schn’n made a blubbery alarm noise when they saw me getting clean away. I gave five or six of them a quick refresh with a cloud of lemon caustic. That stuff damages humans too – but they can take it a lot better than the Spl’schn’ns, who have absorbent green mucosal skin. They sort of explode into iridescent bubbles, quite pretty at first. Still, they were well armed and I took a lot of damage before I’d fully sanitised them.”

And how did you protect the human?

“Just did my best, got in the way of any projectiles, you know. Out in the desert I gave him water now and then; I don’t know where the human input connector is, so I used a short jet in a few likely places, low pressure, with the mildest rinse aid I had. Of course I wasn’t shielded for desert travel. Sand had got in all my bearings by the third day – it seemed to go on forever – and gradually I had to detach and abandon various non-functioning parts of myself. That’s actually where most of the damage is from. A lot of those bits weren’t really meant to detach.”

But against all the odds you arrived at the nearest outpost?

“Yes. Station 9. When we got there he started moving again, so he had been alive the whole time. He told them about the Spl’schn’n and they summoned the fleet: just in time, they said. The engineer told me to pack and load myself tidily, taking particular care not to leak oil on the forecourt surface, deliver myself back to Earth, and wait to be scrapped. So here I am.”